Microsoft has only just added polling within Teams, and now the software giant is already improving it further. You'll soon be able to create polls on the fly using Microsoft's powerful AI technology... and that's not all.
What's in the Works for Microsoft Teams Polls?
Neowin caught wind of a series of entries on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap that hints at the company's plans to revamp how presenters poll their attendees. The Roadmap is a fantastic tool for spotting future updates, and it's where we first discovered that Microsoft is adding anonymous presenters to Teams.
First up is Feature 79493, titled "Microsoft Teams: AI based poll question suggestion for Teams meeting." Microsoft describes this feature as such:
When user wants to create poll for their Teams meeting, Forms intelligence service will suggest some polls based on their meeting purpose.
This will be an interesting feature to see in action. Supposedly, a meeting organizer can use Microsoft's AI to automatically create a poll based on what the meeting is about. Of course, such features are only useful if the AI behind them is up to scratch, so we'll have to see if this feature will work as intended.
Microsoft's AI will also dip into polls you created before. Feature ID 79494 is called "Microsoft Teams: AI based historical poll suggestion for Teams meeting." This feature is like the above, except that Teams will take a dive into the polls you created previously and suggest something based on them.
Finally, there's Feature ID 79495, titled "Microsoft Teams: AI based option suggestion for Teams meeting polls." This one will allow the AI to recommend options to choose from when creating a poll.
That's all from the AI side, yet Microsoft still has more planned. Feature 80519 will allow a poll creator to set a correct answer for multiple-choice questions. This is presumably a feature aimed more toward education than a business setting.
Once you're done with the meeting, Feature 79498 will help generate an after-meeting report that lists all the polls held during the session, plus their results. This is shared with the meeting organizer and presenters.
These features have a release date set for March and April 2021, so you should receive all these updates almost all at once.
A New and Improved Microsoft Teams, Coming Soon
It feels like polls in Teams arrived only yesterday, and Microsoft is already pushing to enhance the feature further. Best of all, the features should all release close to one another, so polling attendees in Teams may feel a lot different in the coming months.
However, if you notice that your teammates get these shiny new updates before you, don't fret. That's just how Microsoft rolls out its updates to ensure the highest quality.
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